Useful Reference Books

A list of popular reference books sent in by the readers of CodeProject

This article has been opened up so any member who is bronze or above can edit and update. Please add your suggestions!

I get a lot of requests from readers about which books are best for learning MFC, ASP, ATL, etc., but with hundreds of books coming out each year, and technology moving ahead in leaps and bounds, keeping up with what's best is hard. Which books have helped you the most?

Here's a list of faves sent in by readers. If you are just starting out in the industry then don't get lured into buying only books that deal with the language you are working in. Read books on how to program. You will save you and your employer a lot of stress. The "Programming Discipline and Design" section below lists a bunch of great books worth reading.

Programming Discipline and Design

Writing Solid Code - Steve Maguire

Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr

Code Complete - Steve McConnell

The Art of Computer Programming - Knuth

Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick

Debugging Applications - John Robbins

Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs - Taligent

Design Patterns - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactices for an Imperfect World (Apress) - Christoper Duncan

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About the Author

Chris is the Co-founder, Administrator, Architect, Chief Editor and Shameless Hack who wrote and runs The Code Project. He's been programming since 1988 while pretending to be, in various guises, an astrophysicist, mathematician, physicist, hydrologist, geomorphologist, defence intelligence researcher and then, when all that got a bit rough on the nerves, a web developer. He is a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP both globally and for Canada locally.

His programming experience includes C/C++, C#, SQL, MFC, ASP, ASP.NET, and far, far too much FORTRAN. He has worked on PocketPCs, AIX mainframes, Sun workstations, and a CRAY YMP C90 behemoth but finds notebooks take up less desk space.

He dodges, he weaves, and he never gets enough sleep. He is kind to small animals.

Chris was born and bred in Australia but splits his time between Toronto and Melbourne, depending on the weather. For relaxation he is into road cycling, snowboarding, rock climbing, and storm chasing.

This is an excellent article, and there are a TON of excellent books already on the list. Thanks for putting this together.

I've been coding now for coming up on 40 years, and can remember back in the 80's when the only time I ever got the chance to buy a few good technical books was when I'd visit Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino. But now days there are tons available, and of course we have Amazon.

I've got a very large collection of technical books, and would add two comments to this discussion. First, since I frequently jump between different languages (Java, C#, C++, etc.), I like to keep a few "cookbooks" on my shelf. As an example: writing threaded code... I've done this in many different languages, but the syntax and best practices are slightly different in each. The way I refresh my memory is to just pickup a cookbook in whatever language I'm working in and look up a simple "how to" on threading. This gives me the instant refresh I'm looking for.

Secondly: A few years back I started buying a number of the books on this list again, but this time in Kindle format. I keep my old Kindle in my laptop backpack and therefore have the 20-30 books at my disposal whenever I need them. Plus, Kindle books are generally cheaper too...